A WALK BESIDE THE LAKE
"The name seems like Sherrill," the interne agreed. "He said it before
when we had him on the table up-stairs; and he has said it now twice
distinctly--Sherrill."
"His name, do you think?"
"I shouldn't say so; he seems trying to speak to some one named
Sherrill."
The nurse waited a few minutes. "Yes; that's how it seems to me, sir.
He said something that sounded like 'Connie' a while ago, and once he
said 'Jim.' There are only four Sherrills in the telephone book, two
of them in Evanston and one way out in Minoota."
"The other?"
"They're only about six blocks from where he was picked up; but they're
on the Drive--the Lawrence Sherrills."
The interne whistled softly and looked more interestedly at his
patient's features. He glanced at his watch, which showed the hour of
the morning to be half-past four. "You'd better make a note of it," he
said. "He's not a Chicagoan; his clothes were made somewhere in
Kansas. He'll be conscious some time during the day; there's only a
slight fracture, and-- Perhaps you'd better call the Sherrill house,
anyway. If he's not known there, no harm done; and if he's one of
their friends and he should..."
The nurse nodded and moved off.
Thus it was that at a quarter to five Constance Sherrill was awakened
by the knocking of one of the servants at her father's door. Her
father went down-stairs to the telephone instrument where he might
reply without disturbing Mrs. Sherrill. Constance, kimona over her
shoulders, stood at the top of the stairs and waited. It became plain
to her at once that whatever had happened had been to Alan Conrad.
"Yes.... Yes.... You are giving him every possible care? ... At once."
She ran part way down the stairs and met her father as he came up. He
told her of the situation briefly.
"He was attacked on the street late last night; he was unconscious when
they found him and took him to the hospital, and has been unconscious
ever since. They say it was an ordinary street attack for robbery. I
shall go at once, of course; but you can do nothing. He would not know
you if you came; and of course he is in competent hands. No; no one
can say yet how seriously he is injured."
She waited in the hall while her father dressed, after calling the
garage on the house telephone for him and ordering the motor. When he
had gone, she returned anxiously to her own rooms; he had promised to
call her after reaching the hospital and as soon as he had learned the
particulars of Alan's condition. It was ridiculous, of course, to
attach any responsibility to her father or herself for what had
happened to Alan--a street attack such as might have happened to any
one--yet she felt that they were in part responsible. Alan Conrad had
come to Chicago, not by their direction, but by Benjamin Corvet's; but
Uncle Benny being gone, they had been the ones who met him, they had
received him into their own house; but they had not thought to warn him
of the dangers of the city and, afterward, they had let him go to live
alone in the house in Astor Street with no better adviser than
Wassaquam. Now, and perhaps because they had not warned him, he had
met injury and, it might be, more than mere injury; he might be dying.
She walked anxiously up and down her room, clutching her kimona about
her; it would be some time yet before she could hear from her father.
She went to the telephone on the stand beside her bed and called Henry
Spearman at his apartments. His servant answered; and, after an
interval, Henry's voice came to her. She told him all that she knew of
what had occurred.
"Do you want me to go over to the hospital?" he asked at once.
"No; father has gone. There is nothing any one can do. I'll call you
again as soon as I hear from father."
He seemed to appreciate from her tone the anxiety she felt; for he set
himself to soothe and encourage her. She listened, answered, and then
hung up the receiver, anxious not to interfere with the expected call
from her father. She moved about the room again, oppressed by the long
wait, until the 'phone rang, and she sprang to it; it was her father
calling from the hospital. Alan had had a few moments' consciousness,
but Sherrill had not been allowed to see him; now, by the report of the
nurse, Alan was sleeping, and both nurse and internes assured Sherrill
that, this being the case, there was no reason for anxiety concerning
him; but Sherrill would wait at the hospital a little longer to make
sure. Constance's breath caught as she answered him, and her eyes
filled with tears of relief. She called Henry again, and he evidently
had been waiting, for he answered at once; he listened without comment
to her repetition of her father's report.
"All right," he said, when she had finished. "I'm coming over, Connie."
"Now?"
"Yes; right away."
"You must give me time to dress!" His assumption of right to come to
her at this early hour recalled to her forcibly the closer relation
which Henry now assumed as existing between them; indeed, as more than
existing, as progressing. And had not she admitted that relation by
telephoning to him during her anxiety? She had not thought how that
must appear to him; she had not thought about it at all; she had just
done it.
She had been one of those who think of betrothal in terms of question
and answer, of a moment when decision is formulated and spoken; she had
supposed that, by withholding reply to Henry's question put even before
Uncle Benny went away, she was thereby maintaining the same relation
between Henry and herself. But now she was discovering that this was
not so; she was realizing that Henry had not required formal answer to
him because he considered that such answer had become superfluous; her
yes, if she accepted him now, would not establish a new bond, it would
merely acknowledge what was already understood. She had accepted
that--had she not--when, in the rush of her feeling, she had thrust her
hand into his the day before; she had accepted it, even more
undeniably, when he had seized her and kissed her.
Not that she had sought or even consciously permitted, that; it had,
indeed, surprised her. While they were alone together, and he was
telling her things about himself, somewhat as he had at the table at
Field's, Alan Conrad was announced, and she had risen to go. Henry had
tried to detain her; then, as he looked down at her, hot impulse had
seemed to conquer him; he caught her, irresistibly; amazed, bewildered,
she looked up at him, and he bent and kissed her. The power of his
arms about her--she could feel them yet, sometimes--half frightened,
half enthralled her. But his lips against her cheek--she had turned
her lips away so that his pressed her cheek! She had been quite unable
to know how she had felt then, because at that instant she had realized
that she was seen. So she had disengaged herself as quickly as
possible and, after Alan was gone, she had fled to her room without
going back to Henry at all.
How could she have expected Henry to have interpreted that flight from
him as disapproval when she had not meant it as that; when, indeed, she
did not know herself what was stirring in her that instinct to go away
alone? She had not by that disowned the new relation which he had
accepted as established between them. And did she wish to disown it
now? What had happened had come sooner and with less of her will
active in it than she had expected; but she knew it was only what she
had expected to come. The pride she had felt in being with him was,
she realized, only anticipatory of the pride she would experience as
his wife. When she considered the feeling of her family and her
friends, she knew that, though some would go through the formal
deploring that Henry had not better birth, all would be satisfied and
more than satisfied; they would even boast about Henry a little, and
entertain him in her honor, and show him off. There was no one--now
that poor Uncle Benny was gone--who would seriously deplore it at all.
Constance had recognized no relic of uneasiness from Uncle Benny's last
appeal to her; she understood that thoroughly. Or, at least, she _had_
understood that; now was there a change in the circumstances of that
understanding, because of what had happened to Alan, that she found
herself re-defining to herself her relation with Henry? No; it had
nothing to do with Henry, of course; it referred only to Benjamin
Corvet. Uncle Benny had "gone away" from his house on Astor Street,
leaving his place there to his son, Alan Conrad. Something which had
disturbed and excited Alan had happened to him on the first night he
had passed in that house; and now, it appeared, he had been prevented
from passing a second night there. What had prevented him had been an
attempted robbery upon the street, her father had said. But suppose it
had been something else than robbery.
She could not formulate more definitely this thought, but it persisted;
she could not deny it entirely and shake it off.
To Alan Conrad, in the late afternoon of that day, this same thought
was coming far more definitely and far more persistently. He had been
awake and sane since shortly after noonday. The pain of a head which
ached throbbingly and of a body bruised and sore was beginning to give
place to a feeling merely of lassitude--a languor which revisited
incoherence upon him when he tried to think. He shifted himself upon
his bed and called the nurse.
"How long am I likely to have to stay here?" he asked her.
"The doctors think not less than two weeks, Mr. Conrad."
He realized, as he again lay silent, that he must put out of his head
now all expectation of ever finding in Corvet's house any such record
as he had been looking for. If there had been a record, it
unquestionably would be gone before he could get about again to seek
it; and he could not guard against its being taken from the house; for,
if he had been hopeless of receiving credence for any accusation he
might make against Spearman while he was in health, how much more
hopeless was it now, when everything he would say could be put to the
credit of his injury and to his delirium! He could not even give
orders for the safeguarding of the house and its contents--his own
property--with assurance that they would be carried out.
The police and hospital attendants, he had learned, had no suspicion of
anything but that he had been the victim of one of the footpads who,
during that month, had been attacking and robbing nightly. Sherrill,
who had visited him about two o'clock, had showed that he suspected no
other possibility. Alan could not prove otherwise; he had not seen his
assailant's face; it was most probable that if he had seen it, he would
not have recognized it. But the man who had assailed him had meant to
kill; he had not been any ordinary robber. That purpose, blindly
recognized and fought against by Alan in their struggle, had been
unmistakable. Only the chance presence of passers-by, who had heard
Alan's shouts and responded to them, had prevented the execution of his
purpose, and had driven the man to swift flight for his own safety.
Alan had believed, in his struggle with Spearman in Corvet's library,
that Spearman might have killed rather than have been discovered there.
Were there others to whom Alan's presence had become a threat so
serious that they would proceed even to the length of calculated
murder? He could not know that. The only safe plan was to assume that
persons, in number unknown, had definite, vital interest in his
"removal" by violence or otherwise, and that, among them, he must
reckon Henry Spearman; and he must fight them alone. For Sherrill's
liking for him, even Constance Sherrill's interest and sympathy were
nullified in practical intent by their admiration for and their
complete confidence in Spearman. It did not matter that Alan might
believe that, in fighting Spearman, he was fighting not only for
himself but for her; he knew now certainly that he must count her as
Spearman's; her! Things swam before him again dizzily as he thought of
her; and he sank back and closed his eyes.
A little before six Constance Sherrill and Spearman called to inquire
after him and were admitted for a few moments to his room. She came to
him, bent over him, while she spoke the few words of sympathy the nurse
allowed to her; she stood back then while Spearman spoke to him. In
the succeeding days, he saw her nearly every day, accompanied always by
her father or Spearman; it was the full two weeks the nurse had
allotted for his remaining in the hospital before he saw her alone.
They had brought him home, the day before--she and her father, in the
motor--to the house on Astor Street. He had insisted on returning
there, refusing the room in their house which they had offered; but the
doctor had enjoined outdoors and moderate exercise for him, and she had
made him promise to come and walk with her. He went to the Sherrill
house about ten o'clock, and they walked northward toward the park.
It was a mild, sunny morning with warm wind from the south, which
sucked up the last patches of snow from the lawns and dried the tiny
trickles of water across the walks. Looking to the land, one might say
that spring soon would be on the way; but, looking to the lake,
midwinter held. The counterscrap of concrete, beyond the withered sod
that edged the Drive, was sheathed in ice; the frozen spray-hummocks
beyond steamed in the sun; and out as far as one could see, floes
floated close together, exposing only here and there a bit of blue.
Wind, cold and chilling, wafted off this ice field, taking the warm
south breeze upon its flanks.
Glancing up at her companion from time to time, Constance saw the color
coming to his face, and he strode beside her quite steadily. Whatever
was his inheritance, his certainly were stamina and vitality; a little
less--or a little dissipation of them--and he might not have recovered
at all, much less have leaped back to strength as he had done. For
since yesterday, the languor which had held him was gone.
They halted a minute near the south entrance of the park at the St.
Gaudens' "Lincoln," which he had not previously seen. The gaunt, sad
figure of the "rail-splitter" in his ill-fitting clothes, seemed to
recall something to him; for he glanced swiftly at her as they turned
away.
"Miss Sherrill," he asked, "have you ever stayed out in the country?"
"I go to northern Michigan, up by the straits, almost every summer for
part of the time, at least; and once in a while we open the house in
winter too for a week or so. It's quite wild--trees and sand and shore
and the water. I've had some of my best times up there."
"You've never been out on the plains?"
"Just to pass over them on the train on the way to the coast."
"That would be in winter or in spring; I was thinking about the plains
in late summer, when we--Jim and Betty, the children of the people I
was with in Kansas--"
"I remember them."
"When we used to play at being pioneers in our sunflower shacks."
"Sunflower shacks?" she questioned.
"I was dreaming we were building them again when I was delirious just
after I was hurt, it seems. I thought that I was back in Kansas and
was little again. The prairie was all brown as it is in late summer,
brown billows of dried grass which let you see the chips of limestone
and flint scattered on the ground beneath; and in the hollows there
were acres and acres of sunflowers, three times as tall as either Jim
or I, and with stalks as thick as a man's wrist, where Jim and Betty
and I ... and you, Miss Sherrill, were playing."
"I?"
"We cut paths through the sunflowers with a corn knife," Alan
continued, not looking at her, "and built houses in them by twining the
cut stalks in and out among those still standing. I'd wondered, you
see, what you must have been like when you were a little girl, so, I
suppose, when I was delirious, I saw you that way."
She had looked up at him a little apprehensively, afraid that he was
going to say something more; but his look reassured her.
"Then that," she hazarded, "must have been how the hospital people
learned our name. I'd wondered about that; they said you were
unconscious first, and then delirious and when you spoke you said,
among other names, mine--Connie and Sherrill."
He colored and glanced away. "I thought they might have told you that,
so I wanted you to know. They say that in a dream, or in delirium,
after your brain establishes the first absurdity--like your playing out
among the sunflowers with me when we were little--everything else is
consistent. I wouldn't call a little girl 'Miss Sherrill,' of course.
Ever since I've known you, I couldn't help thinking a great deal about
you; you're not like any one else I've ever known. But I didn't want
you to think I thought of you--familiarly."
"I speak of you always as Alan to father," she said.
He was silent for a moment. "They lasted hardly for a day--those
sunflower houses, Miss Sherrill," he said quietly. "They withered
almost as soon as they were made. Castles in Kansas, one might say!
No one could live in them."
Apprehensive again, she colored. He had recalled to her, without
meaning to do so, she thought, that he had seen her in Spearman's arms;
she was quite sure that recollection of this was in his mind. But in
spite of this--or rather, exactly because of it--she understood that he
had formed his own impression of the relation between Henry and herself
and that, consequently, he was not likely to say anything more like
this.
They had walked east, across the damp, dead turf to where the Drive
leaves the shore and is built out into the lake; as they crossed to it
on the smooth ice of the lagoon between, he took her arm to steady her.
"There is something I have been wanting to ask you," she said.
"Yes."
"That night when you were hurt--it was for robbery, they said. What do
you think about it?" She watched him as he looked at her and then
away; but his face was completely expressionless.
"The proceedings were a little too rapid for me to judge, Miss
Sherrill."
"But there was no demand upon you to give over your money before you
were attacked?"
"No."
She breathed a little more quickly. "It must be a strange sensation,"
she observed, "to know that some one has tried to kill you."
"It must, indeed."
"You mean you don't think that he tried to kill you?"
"The police captain thinks not; he says it was the work of a man new to
the blackjack, and he hit harder and oftener than he needed. He says
that sort are the dangerous ones--that one's quite safe in the hands of
an experienced slugger, as you would be with the skilful man in any
line. I never thought of it that way before. He almost made it into
an argument for leaving the trained artists loose on the streets, for
the safety of the public, instead of turning the business over to boys
only half educated."
"What do you think about the man yourself?" Constance persisted.
"The apprentice who practiced on me?"
She waited, watching his eyes. "I was hardly in a condition, Miss
Sherrill, to appreciate anything about the man at all. Why do you ask?"
"Because--" She hesitated an instant, "if you were attacked to be
killed, it meant that you must have been attacked as the son of--Mr.
Corvet. Then that meant--at least it implied, that Mr. Corvet was
killed, that he did not go away. You see that, of course."
"Were you the only one who thought that? Or did some one speak to you
about it?"
"No one did; I spoke to father. He thought--"
"Yes."
"Well, if Mr. Corvet was murdered--I'm following what father thought,
you understand--it involved something a good deal worse perhaps than
anything that could have been involved if he had only gone away. The
facts we had made it certain that--if what had happened to him was
death at the hands of another--he must have foreseen that death and,
seeking no protection for himself ... it implied, that he preferred to
die rather than to ask protection--that there was something whose
concealment he thought mattered even more to him than life. It--it
might have meant that he considered his life was ... due to whomever
took it." Her voice, which had become very low, now ceased. She was
speaking to Alan of his father--a father whom he had never known, and
whom he could not have recognized by sight until she showed him the
picture a few weeks before; but she was speaking of his father.
"Mr. Sherrill didn't feel that it was necessary for him to do anything,
even though he thought that?"
"If Mr. Corvet was dead, we could do him no good, surely, by telling
this to the police; if the police succeeded in finding out all the
facts, we would be doing only what Uncle Benny did not wish--what he
preferred death to. We could not tell the police about it without
telling them all about Mr. Corvet too. So father would not let himself
believe that you had been attacked to be killed. He had to believe the
police theory was sufficient."
Alan made no comment at once. "Wassaquam believes Mr. Corvet is dead,"
he said finally. "He told me so. Does your father believe that?"
"I think he is beginning to believe it."
They had reached the little bridge that breaks the Drive and spans the
channel through which the motor boats reach harbor in the lagoon; he
rested his arms upon the rail of the bridge and looked down into the
channel, now frozen. He seemed to her to consider and to decide upon
something.
"I've not told any one," he said, now watching her, "how I happened to
be out of the house that night. I followed a man who came there to the
house. Wassaquam did not know his name. He did not know Mr. Corvet
was gone; for he came there to see Mr. Corvet. He was not an ordinary
friend of Mr. Corvet's; but he had come there often; Wassaquam did not
know why. Wassaquam had sent the man away, and I ran out after him;
but I could not find him."
He stopped an instant, studying her. "That was not the first man who
came to the house," he went on quickly, as she was about to speak. "I
found a man in Mr. Corvet's house the first night that I spent there.
Wassaquam was away, you remember, and I was alone in the house."
"A man there in the house?" she repeated.
"He wasn't there when I entered the house--at least I don't think he
was. I heard him below, after I had gone up-stairs. I came down then
and saw him. He was going through Mr. Corvet's things--not the silver
and all that, but through his desks and files and cases. He was
looking for something--something which he seemed to want very much;
when I interfered, it greatly excited him."
They had turned back from the bridge and were returning along the way
that they had come; but now she stopped and looked up at him.
"What happened when you 'interfered'?"
"A queer thing."
"What?"
"I frightened him."
"Frightened him?" She had appreciated in his tone more significance
than the casual meaning of the words.
"He thought I was a ghost."
"A ghost. Whose ghost?"
He shrugged. "I don't know; some one whom he seemed to have known
pretty well--and whom Mr. Corvet knew, he thought."
"Why didn't you tell us this before?"
"At least--I am telling you now, Miss Sherrill. I frightened him, and
he got away. But I had seen him plainly. I can describe him....
You've talked with your father of the possibility that something might
'happen' to me such as, perhaps, happened to Mr. Corvet. If anything
does happen to me, a description of the man may ... prove useful."
He saw the color leave her face, and her eyes brighten; he accepted
this for agreement on her part. Then clearly and definitely as he
could, he described Spearman to her. She did not recognize the
description; he had known she would not. Had not Spearman been in
Duluth? Beyond that, was not connection of Spearman with the prowler
in Corvet's house the one connection of all most difficult for her to
make? But he saw her fixing and recording the description in her mind.
They were silent as they went on toward her home. He had said all he
could, or dared to say; to tell her that the man had been Spearman
would not merely have awakened her incredulity; it would have destroyed
credence utterly. A definite change in their relation to one another
had taken place during their walk. The fullness, the frankness of the
sympathy there had been between them almost from their first meeting,
had gone; she was quite aware, he saw, that he had not frankly answered
her questions; she was aware that in some way he had drawn back from
her and shut her out from his thoughts about his own position here.
But he had known that this must be so; it had been his first definite
realization after his return to consciousness in the hospital when,
knowing now her relation to Spearman, he had found all questions which
concerned his relations with the people here made immeasurably more
acute by the attack upon him.
She asked him to come in and stay for luncheon, as they reached her
home, but she asked it without urging; at his refusal she moved slowly
up the steps; but she halted when she saw that he did not go on.
"Miss Sherrill," he said, looking up at her, "how much money is there
in your house?"
She smiled, amused and a little perplexed; then sobered as she saw his
intentness on her answer.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"I mean--how much is ordinarily kept there?"
"Why, very little in actual cash. We pay everything by
check--tradesmen and servants; and even if we happen not to have a
charge account where we make a purchase, they know who we are and are
always willing to charge it to us."
"Thank you. It would be rather unusual then for you--or your
neighbors--to have currency at hand exceeding the hundreds?"
"Exceeding the hundreds? That means in the thousands--or at least one
thousand; yes, for us, it would be quite unusual."
She waited for him to explain why he had asked; it was not, she felt
sure, for any reason which could readily suggest itself to her. But he
only thanked her again and lifted his hat and moved away. Looking
after him from the window after she had entered the house, she saw him
turn the corner in the direction of Astor Street.